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Zuckerberg: telepathy is the future of Facebook

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg thinks that you will soon be able to send emotions directly to your friends.

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In a Q&A session held (where else) on Facebook, the 31-year-old billionaire said that in the relatively near future it would be possible to send anything -- including the feedback from our senses -- to friends as easily as we send a picture, video or text today. Such a tool would represent "the ultimate communication technology" Zuckerberg said. "One day, I believe we'll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You'll be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you like," he said "In the future video will be even more important than photos. After that, immersive experiences like VR will become the norm. And after that, we'll have the power to share our full sensory and emotional experience with people whenever we'd like."

In the course of the celebrity-packed Q&A, which featured questions from Shakira, Stephen Hawking, Arnold 'The Terminator' Schwarzenegger and Sir Richard Branson, Zuckerberg made a number of other interesting, speculative and otherwise inscrutable predictions.

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Here are some other key visions Zuckerberg outlined for the future of Facebook.

Facebook thinks instant democracy is possible

"We can build richer relationships with the people we love and care about. We know about what’s going on in the world and can make better decisions in our jobs and lives. We are also more informed and can make better decisions collectively as a society. This increase in the power people have to share is one of the major forces driving the world today."

AI will soon find videos as interesting as we do

"Our goal is to build AI systems that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc.

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For vision, we're building systems that can recognize everything that's in an image or a video. This includes people, objects, scenes, etc. These systems need to understand the context of the images and videos as well as whatever is in them.

For listening and language, we're focusing on translating speech to text, text between any languages, and also being able to answer any natural language question you ask."

Scientists will discover a 'grand unified theory' of humanity

Zuckerberg responded to Stephen Hawking: "I'm most interested in questions about people. What will enable us to live forever? How do we cure all diseases? How does the brain work? How does learning work and how we can empower humans to learn a million times more?

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I'm also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about. I bet there is."

Internet.org will come to Europe

"We want to bring Internet.org everyone where there are people who need to be connected. We're starting off by prioritizing the countries with the most unconnected people and by working with network operators and governments who are most excited about working with Internet.org to get everyone online in their countries."

Facebook wants users to moderate content

"I've thought a lot about this and I agree with your sentiment. Designing the right mechanism is difficult though and if we get this wrong it would be very negative for our community. One of the biggest challenges is getting enough people to vote so that it actually reflects the community's opinions rather than just a very small minority. I'm going to keep thinking about this though."

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Putting new people online will have "amazing" consequences

Zuckerberg told Branson: "Think about how many brilliant entrepreneurs there are out there who have great ideas and the will to change the world, but just lack basic tools to do so today. If you go by the population, almost 2/3 of these entrepreneurs don't have internet access today. Once they get connected, we may have 3x as many good ideas and amazing new services built that will benefit everyone around the world."

Education is going to become more personalised

Zuckerberg told Shakira: "I'm very excited about personalized learning — giving everyone the ability to use technology to learn what they're most interested in and at their own pace. There are some great new schools experimenting with different personalized learning models and getting great results. I'm supporting some of those schools through my personal philanthropy, and Facebook is also helping to build open source software to power some of these tools."

Oculus Rift will be the future of (some) communication:

"Our mission to give people the power to experience anything. Even if you don't have the ability to travel somewhere, or to be with someone in person, or even if something is physically impossible to build in our analog world, the goal is to help build a medium that will give you the ability to do all of these things you might not otherwise be able to do.

This will be incredibly powerful as a communication medium as well. Just like we capture photos and videos today and then share them on the internet to let others experience them too, we'll be able to capture whole 3D scenes and create new environments and then share those with people as well. It will be pretty wild."